Lynn Chealander, Michael Chealander and Amy Mihyang have spent the last four years knocking it down.

The result is Facedowns, a blog that features pics from the travelers’ journeys through six continents. “3 people. 24 countries. 0 faces,” reads the blog’s tagline. And so it is: in every photo, one of the three lies flat on a surface, nose to the dirt.

“It’s definitely a humorous project, but we also think it’s a way to reconsider the stereotypical tourist photo, which can make actual places look a bit like prom backdrops,” Cheleander, a Seattle expat living in New Zealand, wrote in an e-mail.

It all started in 2006, when Seattleite Michael Cheleander, Lynn’s brother, was studying abroad in London while Lynn and Mihyang were working there. Tired of the cliché travel photo, Michael took some pictures of himself lying face-down in front of monuments. Mihyang and his sister tried it out in Wales, and a new tradition was born.

Of the three travelers, Michael Chealander is the least mobile, and that’s saying something. Though Michael is settled down in Seattle, Lynn Chealander and Mihyang, who is also American, are restless travelers seeing the world on a series of work visas.

Lynn worked in Melbourne, Australia, before she moved to New Zealand on a 1-year visa. Mihyang got a teaching certification in Prague, then taught in Buenos Aires, Argentina before starting her current gig in Seoul, South Korea.

Lynn Chealander held a stationary job in Seattle for two years. But that wasn’t cutting it.

“There are too many awesome places in the world to fit into two weeks a year,” she wrote. She’s headed to Singapore in 2011.

As for the blog, it’s got a long future. The trio hopes to face-plant at the Egyptian pyramids, Peru’s Machu Picchu, the Taj Mahal and Mt. Rushmore.

Closer to home, Lynn wants her brother to play dead in front of the viaduct before it’s too late. Meanwhile, she’s out to claim a bigger prize.

“I am determined to one day bag our seventh continent and take one in Antarctica,” she wrote.

Update: Lynn Chealander added a little context to the photos from New Zealand via email Friday:

It can be interesting as we are not often all on the same continent, much less in the same place. So we get to convince new-found travel friends or total strangers to take the photo, which is fun. Even when we know the photographer, the other people in the photo can be pretty entertaining – I think some of our best are the ones with funny reactions (the photographer guy in the Vatican one, for example). The most recent photo we’ve posted is of Amy at Obama’s inauguration, and apparently the cops in the picture told her “if you don’t get up right now, we will remove you.” I’ll ask her when she’s online (it’s 5:30 AM in Seoul), but I seem to recall that somebody stood on her by accident during one of her Korean photos.

Update: Here’s more on that last part:

Just talked to Amy, and she wasn’t stood on, but a random tourist spilled an entire cup of coffee on her during the making of this photo. Crazy!